


Brevity

by Sab



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, Short, sga_flashfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-01
Updated: 2005-12-01
Packaged: 2017-10-02 08:44:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sab/pseuds/Sab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for sga_flashfic's Debriefing challenge. It's late and Punk's not here.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Brevity

**Author's Note:**

> Written for sga_flashfic's Debriefing challenge. It's late and Punk's not here.

Weir gets briefed.

Her calendar is a smattering of briefings; her calendar is nonsense in Pegasus but she keeps it though she's crossed out the dates, the names of the months and the days they don't have out here, where every day is Tuesday with a week's worth of catastrophes and missions ahead.

Weir hasn't been debriefed in ages. There's the occasional runin with a Marine or a scientist where she's got things to say about desalination procedures and rolling brownouts, and sometimes they'll take notes before they scurry off to dirty their knuckles in waste pipeage and come back to brief her all about it.

She debriefs her teams, who are her emissaries, her long arms out into that great vast. They're in space, damnit, so much to be explored, so many new and unknown civilizations to catalog, friend or foe. She has backwork as a result of these briefings; she is always behind and she is never up to date and every day is last Tuesday. And the dumbasses do things much more slowly than she'd like, and the crackerjacks do things much more quickly and without proper pause. The alpha team is back.

John doesn't let Ford name things, so he's going with TEAM AWESOME, a for alpha. It's a joke for John and the rest of his team, and some of them don't get it, but it doesn't matter because Major Sheppard's proud as punch.

"So," she says, sitting down. "Brief me."

"Oh, it was --" John starts, but McKay cuts him off.

"Look, it's simple. They've managed -- and, yes, okay, so the fact that they seem to have their hands on phased energy technology is a little terrifying, but we need to look at -- they have rifles that can take down a Wraith. And, I mean, so do we, if you consider after forty bullets the thing can still sit up and make really creepy threats till you hit him with forty more. But, seriously, this is a no-brainer. If they've been able to reverse engineer the Wraith pulse beam technology, oh, I gotta get my hands on that."

"Rodney!" Weir grins. "That's morbid."

"Maybe, but it's as close as we're gonna get to learning how to develop phased energy technology ourselves, and I'm sure I don't have to remind you that a breakthrough of that kind could mean significant advances in just about every field of modern technology."

"And we can kill a Wraith with one shot," John drawls. "That too."

Weir likes to be deliberate. She likes to weigh the pros and cons, to embark on a course of action that makes the most sense both in the short term and the long. But John Sheppard likes to fly jumpers and Rodney McKay likes taking things apart to see how they work, and they're the ones who get to go out there where there's space to be flown in and new technologies to discover. They have no patience for her deliberation, and she knows it, and because she is their leader, she lets them go.

"What do the rest of you think?" she asks, turning to Ford.

"We gotta do it," Ford says. "No question."

Teyla nods. "It is dangerous, but I agree. Possessing these weapons could shift the tide of war in our favor. And in war there are always risks."

"Well then," Weir says, standing up, slapping her hands on her thighs. "I trust you. Do it." And they do.

The world will always be divided between the briefers and the briefed, and Weir is accepting her life among the briefed. When she debriefs, it's travelogue, adventure! And some of it, a little, maybe, because of her. Or John and McKay come back, and John is favoring his left foot, just a little, and they both say, "it's nothing," but McKay helps John up the stairs and Elizabeth sees how heavily John's arm rests on McKay's shoulder, sees streaks of dirt from an alien world up the back of John's pants.

Elizabeth will never know that world they stepped on, and tripped on, and when she is briefed, they will give her the information she needs, and no one will mention that Sheppard and McKay spent six hours lost and taking shelter in a cave in the rocky hills while thunder and lightning cracked the sky and McKay wrapped John's ankle in his own t-shirt and they watched as an alien sun rose and broke through the clouds of an alien sky. And then they'll leave again for terra incognita, and she wishes them luck, and she'll get caught up on some paperwork now, waiting for them to return, waiting to be briefed.


End file.
